PARTING THE OCEAN OF INFORMATION – WIN FAKE NEWS WAR (2)

THE MIRACLE RESCUE

Big Obstacles In The Fight Against Fake News

The problem that Facebook and other tech companies are faced with is:

How to distinguish between real news and fake ones or How to recognize fake news?

 

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The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form (pictured at right) to assist people in recognizing fake news. These points have been corroborated by experts in the cognitive science of information processing. Its main points are:

1. Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose)
2. Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story)
3. Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible)
4. Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims)
5. Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date)
6. Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire)
7. Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgement)
8. Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).

The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), launched in 2015, supports international collaborative efforts in fact-checking, provides training and has published a code of principles. In 2017 it introduced an application and vetting process for journalistic organisations. One of IFCN’s verified signatories, the independent, not-for-profit media journal The Conversation, created a short animation explaining its fact checking process, which involves “extra checks and balances, including blind peer review by a second academic expert, additional scrutiny and editorial oversight”.

Beginning in the 2017 school year, children in Taiwan study a new curriculum designed to teach critical reading of propaganda and the evaluation of sources. Called “media literacy”, the course provides training in journalism in the new information society.

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The above information^[1] is official instructions wrote on Wiki in order to help people identify fake news. These instructions are necessary, but they become complicated and are “impossible mission” to most people.

Why?

While news (both fake and real ones) is read by all people, not many people can follow the above instructions, or even most people don’t (want to) do that. Specially, a lot of people just focus on reading news stories’ headlines and take actions hurriedly!

Even experts also can’t identify whether it’s fake or real news if they don’t have enough information and actual proofs!

 

Impatience, carelessness, and especially laziness of people (users) in reading and verifying news are really big obstacles that make the fake news war get worse and more difficult.

What’s more?

Social media (such as Facebook, Youtube, Google+, Twitter, etc…) is helping news spread faster than ever. The internet, the ocean of information, is now a huge mess of real and fake news. People, especially younger ones migrating online to read, listen to and watch the news^[2], still can’t clearly distinguish them from each other.

 

Therefore, it becomes complicated and is an “impossible mission” to most people when trying to distinguish between fake news and real ones.

The fake news problem gets worse when a lot of people just want to believe in what they want to believe and they skip verifying information before their real actions.

People still don’t forget The 2017 Jharkhand mob lynchings taking place in May 2017, “mobs in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand beat seven people to death in two separate incidents that horrified the country”^[3]. Seven people “lynched in two incidents in less than 24 hours over whatsapp rumours” ^[4].

{The trigger was a WhatsApp message that had gone viral, urging people to be careful of strangers as they most likely belonged to a “child lifting gang”. As the message passed on, police say hysteria increased. Villagers armed themselves and began attacking anyone they did not recognise, with tragic results.}^[5] reported BBC.

An explanation?

{“Reach has exploded, thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and cheap data packages. Rumours spread further and faster,” Pratik Sinha, the founder of Altnews.in told the BBC.

“Suddenly people from rural areas in particular are inundated with information and are unable to distinguish what is real from what is not. They tend to believe whatever is sent to them.”}^[6]

BBC informed “most of India’s fake news spreads via WhatsApp and mobile phone messages, because for a majority of Indians, their first point of exposure to the internet is via their phone.” ^[7]

So, the main matter is: How can we deal with the fake news problem and avoid serious consequences caused by misinformation, fake news?

The Miracle: How To Part The Ocean of Information?

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If you are a member of Government (especially one of US Government) or you are CEO or an executive of Facebook/Google/Twitter, figure out my exclusive solution for the fake news problem now! You can contact me here 

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Reference

[1] Source: http://ift.tt/2jTx2nL

[2] Read more: http://ift.tt/2dRqzCM

^[3] Source: http://ift.tt/2g4ArNk

^[4] Source: http://ift.tt/2rGKKuR

^[5] Source: http://ift.tt/2vzYtFP

^[6] Source: http://ift.tt/2vzYtFP

^[7] Source: http://ift.tt/2vzYtFP

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Unknown February 26, 2018  No comment

‘STORMS’ ON THE OCEAN OF INFORMATION – FAKE NEWS WAR

 A HARD WAR

‘Storms’

On January 19^th 2018, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, wrote an important post on his Facebook timeline:

“Last week I announced a major change to encourage meaningful social interactions with family and friends over passive consumption. As a result, you’ll see less public content, including news, video, and posts from brands. After this change, we expect news to make up roughly 4% of News Feed — down from roughly 5% today. This is a big change, but news will always be a critical way for people to start conversations on important topics.

Today I’m sharing our second major update this year: to make sure the news you see, while less overall, is high quality. I’ve asked our product teams to make sure we prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local. And we’re starting next week with trusted sources.” [1]

 

Why did Mark decide to “prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local”? 

He explained:

“There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today. Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them.” [2] said Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In fact, “Facebook had to deal with a string of controversies and blunders, not limited to: being accused of imperialism in India, censorship of historical photos, and livestreaming footage of human rights violations. Not to mention misreported advertising metrics and the increasingly desperate cloning of rival Snapchat’s core features. Things came to a head in November, when the social network was accused of influencing the US presidential election through politically polarized filter bubbles and a failure to tackle the spread of misinformation. The icing on the already unpalatable cake was Pope Francis last week declaring that fake news is a sin.” [3]. Facebook, with its more than 2 billion people^[4], “has faced particularly strong criticism about spreading fake news” [5]

However, Facebook is not the only one. Huge Tech companies are “in the fight against foreign influence in local political systems, battling campaigns like the Russian-state backed one that targeted Americans^[6] ahead of the last US presidential election, British voters before the Brexit vote^[7], or the fake news that circulated in Kenya before its general election^[8]. The US government has failed so far to make any meaningful progress in that fight, and the 2018 midterm congressional elections may be influenced as well^[9].”^[10]

CNN reported “Facebook, Google and Twitter were grilled by Congress earlier this month (November 2017) over how foreign nationals used social media platforms to spread misinformation during the 2016 presidential election.” [11]

On Feb 8 2018, “Eleven members of parliament from the United Kingdom journeyed to a large ballroom in Washington, D.C., Thursday to learn about fake news from three U.S. social media giants, Google, Facebook and Twitter.”^[12] reported Chicago Tribune. These British Parliament members grilled all three of them with questions^[13] that exposed the status quo:

• {“Why has your self regulation so demonstrably failed and how many chances do you need?” Julian Knight, one of the British lawmakers, pointedly asked a Google executive, in a question that seemed to characterize the nearly four-hour exchange at George Washington University.}
• {“How can your system be described as anything other than inadequate?” another member of parliament or MP asked Twitter, this time about removing inflammatory content.}
• {“Is this too much for you?” a third MP asked Twitter, concerning its “infestation” of “bot” accounts.}
• {“You haven’t looked. You haven’t looked, have you? That’s the thing,” boomed Committee Chairman Damian Collins, loudly raising his voice and interrupting Simon Milner, Facebook’s policy director for the U.K., Middle East and Africa. In an initial examination of Russian-funded interference that took place during the U.K. vote to leave the European Union, Facebook concluded that only a “limited” amount of activity had been found. But Facebook’s analysis focused on Russian accounts that were previously linked to interference in the U.S. presidential election. Collins and the committee have demanded that Facebook expands its search. The committee suspects that additional groups, perhaps other state actors, may have attempted to meddle in the Brexit vote. Collins argued that Facebook’s probe thus far was the “bare minimum.”}

Members of British Parliament, on Feb 8^th 2018, grilled Facebook, Twitter, Google execs over fake news^[14]

 

Many giant companies in the world, especially Tech ones, are being faced with the huge problem occuring over the internet, the ocean of information: Fake, false news

Can they, giant Tech companies, really stop ‘storms’ on the ocean of information threatening their business and people’s lives?

 

The Fake News War

After many struggles (to combat misinformation, fake news), Facebook “decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective” as Mark Zuckerberg affirmed in his recent post^[15].

“The hard question we’ve struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division.” [16] said Mark.

Not only Mark but also other CEOs, especially Tech ones, are looking for efficient solutions to fight against fake news that has affected their business badly and has damaged their companies’ reputation. Simply, they are trying hard to solve the most serious existing problem: How To Distinguish Between Fake News And Real Ones or How To Recognize Fake News.

“In the year since the election, the tech companies have tried to show they can do better. Facebook and Google have worked with independent fact checking organizations^[17] to flag concerning articles. Facebook also introduced related links^[18] to provide additional perspectives for stories shared in the News Feed.” [19]

On April 2017, “Google said it would try^[20] to improve its search results through efforts to demote low-quality content, such as “misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes, and unsupported conspiracy theories.” The company also recently revamped^[21] how it creates its “featured snippets” appearing at the top of search results to give more weight to high-quality information.” [22]

 According to Fortune, “Twitter said in a blog post that it would email nearly 678,000 users that may have inadvertently interacted with now-suspended accounts believed to have been linked to a Russian propaganda outfit called the Internet Research Agency (IRA).”^[23]

Back to November 2017, “Facebook (FB), Google (GOOGL) and Twitter (TWTR) said Thursday they have committed to using new “trust indicators” to help users better vet the reliability of the publications and journalists behind articles that appear in news feeds.” [24]  reported CNN.

In its newest actions, Facebook “will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source. The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don’t follow them directly. (We eliminate from the sample those who aren’t familiar with a source, so the output is a ratio of those who trust the source to those who are familiar with it.)”^[25]. Mark Zuckerberg explained to people “It will only shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community” [26]

 The CEO of Facebook hopes “when we read news, making sure it’s from high quality and trusted sources.”^[27].

Can those jobs work and solve the fake news problem to the every roots?

 

 The Existing State

 

At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos on Jan 2018, fake news, misinformation, bots, and propaganda were hot topics. Quartz.com then aksed some attendees for the existing state of the fake news problem.

{“You’d have to take a stand about factuality,” said Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and author of On Tyranny, who attended the Davos conference and said he heard second-hand about Google executives’ fake news discussions. You can’t use a “protocol or an algorithm,” he said, you need “human beings who take responsibility for things.”} ^[28]

{Can, and should, Google (which some critics say is already too powerful) play the role of filtering out what’s true and what is not?

“Of course it can’t,” said Rachel Botsman, a lecturer at Oxford’s Saïd Business School and author of Who Can You Trust, who attended the Davos conference. And, she added, “we don’t want it to.”}^[29]

 Ultimately, What Miracle Will Distinguish Them (Real & Fake News) While Science is Helpless?

 

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If you are a member of Government (especially one of US Government) or you are CEO or an executive of Facebook/Google/Twitter, figure out my exclusive solution for the fake news problem now! You can contact me here 

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Reference

[1] Extracted from Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline in Jan 19 2018: http://ift.tt/2mZ2VLG

[2] Extracted from Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline on Jan 19 2018: http://ift.tt/2mZ2VLG

[3] Source: http://ift.tt/2hDSs3p

[4] Source in 27 June 2017: http://ift.tt/2sj3hMS

[5] Source: http://ift.tt/2jviqfv

[6] Source: http://ift.tt/2iSSY32

[7] Source: http://ift.tt/2mktld2

[8] Source: http://ift.tt/2tCM6eM

[9] Source: http://ift.tt/2s3IKkL

[10] Source: http://ift.tt/2BMmhfU

[11] Source: http://ift.tt/2jviqfv

[12] Source: http://ift.tt/2nNaoOo

[13] Source: http://ift.tt/2nNaoOo

[14] Image source: http://ift.tt/2nNaoOo

[15] Extracted from Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline in Jan 19 2018: http://ift.tt/2mZ2VLG

[16] Extracted from Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline in Jan 19 2018: http://ift.tt/2mZ2VLG

[17] Read more: http://ift.tt/2CYm5az

[18] Read more: http://ift.tt/2HD3Vhg

[19] Source: http://ift.tt/2jviqfv

[20] Source: http://ift.tt/2q0MiPC

[21] Source: http://ift.tt/2BDFhsR

[22] Source: http://ift.tt/2BMmhfU

[23] Source: http://ift.tt/2FWCbDl

[24] Source: http://ift.tt/2FWCbDl

[25] Extracted from Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline in Jan 19 2018: http://ift.tt/2mZ2VLG

[26] Extracted from Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline in Jan 19 2018: http://ift.tt/2mZ2VLG

[27] Extracted from Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline in Jan 19 2018: http://ift.tt/2mZ2VLG

[28] Source: http://ift.tt/2BMmhfU

[29] Source: http://ift.tt/2BMmhfU

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Unknown February 23, 2018  No comment